Maruk Shipwrecked
A Pirate-themed third-person platformer inspired by A Hat in Time that we made in 13 weeks half-time with our Custom Engine: Lamp Engine.
My Contribution
- Shaders
- Water shaders for ocean, vortex, waterfalls and geysers
- Triplanar world tiling materials
- Ghostly Objects
- Ghost Vision effects
- Collectibles
- Wind shader for grass
- Blueprinted tools in Unreal
- Various particle emitters
Tools
- Custom Game Engine: Lamp Engine
- Visual Studio for HLSL shaders
- Unreal (As a custom level Editor)
- Substance Designer
- Perforce (Version Control)
Water Shaders
Ocean shader
Creating a good-looking water shader in a Custom Engine was a challenge. I did some research into Signed Distance Fields, which is a common technique when making stylized water shaders in Unreal and Unity, but it was not available in our engine. I had to find another way. To create the edge foam, waves and depth fade, I use pixel data from the Geometry Buffer to get the distance between the underlying pixel and the water's surface.
A problem with this was that it became based on the camera's current rotation and the angle at which the water was viewed, which looked weird. I solved this by only calculating distance for the up-axis to remove the camera dependency, and it worked pretty well!
The waves are made with depth data, adding time and frac to make a moving gradient, and adding noise to it to create a foam effect. The big "wind waker" caustics are just a few tiling patterns, scaled differently with some UV distortion.
Whirlpool shader
A lot of the techniques I used in the Ocean shader are also used for the whirlpool in the final level. I also use more aggressive UV animation to swirl around and a depth fade towards the bottom to blend it all together. There is also a lot of debris floating around in the whirlpool, which interacts well with the regular depth fade.
Waterfalls and Geysers
All waterfalls and geysers use the same shader. A panning texture with the same water pattern and customizable direction. It has a slight gradient based on its UV-height, which gives it more depth. I used a bunch of waterfalls stacked on top of each other to create the rapids in the last level.
Ghost Effects
Ghost Vision
Early in the game, the player unlocks the Ghost Vision ability, which lets them interact with Ghost Objects nearby. The spherical outline applies to everything using the deferred pixel shader for the master materials. We thought of using a decal in the beginning, but went for this approach to make it look good above and below Maruk as well.
I added the glowing eyes and tattoos using an emissive mask and made some ghost particles around him.
Ghost Objects
The Ghost Object and its inverted version both use the same shader with different colors and their opacity is flipped. The erosion mask is made by combining two noises and panning them in different directions. The same noise textures are also used to make the solid texture feel smoky and ethereal. It is also a world-tiling material and works well on different objects at different scales.
Ghost Fire
- "Egg" mesh with wavy vertex animation.
- Alpha erosion with panning noise combined with UV to make the flames more solid at the bottom.
- Opacity based on the same UV, being more solid at the bottom.
